Rainbow 6 Siege is the Best Worst Game I’ve Ever Played

Yes, the title is confusing but we will get to that later. Let me preface by saying I love Rainbow 6 Siege. I picked up the standard edition on the Steam Summer Sale for $20 (Yes I have a gaming PC now. Look at it. Gorgeous I know). I had wanted the game for a while on the PS4 but the price could never quite get low enough for me to invest in it. It seemed like everyone loved it or hated it and I was far more likely to fall into the hate bucket. But the Steam Sale hit and with their easy return policy I had nothing to lose… except the 50 hours of my life I’ve sunk into this soul-sucking game. So here are:

3 Things That I Hate About Rainbow Six Siege

1. Toxic Playerbase

Something that I seemed to have escaped over the years is toxic players. I spend most of my multiplayer time on MMO’s or Overwatch. And when I play Overwatch I’m playing with friends with no real communication with the rest of the team (sorry team). But even in my younger years in competitive gaming or intense gears of war bragging rights games have I ever experienced people as awful as the ones in Rainbow Six Siege.

I will grant it that this is the PC community we’re talking about which is known for harsher waters but it’s just out of hand. Team killing, death threats, purposely throwing games and every verbal offense you can think of. There will be some days where you can’t even play a standard round and you’re stuck with teammates killing each other. This is probably my least favorite thing about the game and it ruins things so quickly. And in some cases, you’re forced to make a decision. If someone threatens to team kill you, you’ve got to be the first one to pull the trigger or you’re going to be stuck spectating for 10 minutes while they go enjoy the game.

On the other hand, I have met some fantastic people that were stellar teammates. They are helpful in-game and are fun to play with. And crazy enough, you win more games when people like that are on your team. And if you find those people you friend them right now. Every friend you party up with is one less toxic person potentially making it into your game.

2. …Ubisoft Servers

I am not a fan of Ubisoft as a developer. Over the past few years they’ve developed a terrible habit of launching overhyped games that are poorly supported and left to die. But the winds of change are blowing!

Ubisoft launched this game to what most deemed “Dead on Arrival”. I can’t speak to how bad R6 Siege was when it launched. You can find that article anywhere if you’re interested. But what I can tell you about is the state of the game right now and how Ubisoft chooses to profit on the game.

The servers are “meh”. For me they haven’t been a huge issue. But there have been days where the server will crash and you can’t get into a game but this is pretty typical for most online games now a’days. It happens. The true server issue is ping. The game has latency which causes extreme frustration and gives way to what we call “Peekers Advantage”. This means there’s roughly a half second delay between what you see and what everyone else sees. So if I lean into a doorway and see you, I have about a half a second before they actually see me on their screen, giving me the advantage. This is garbage but it’s exploited by everyone. As long as it’s a level playing field it’s hard to complain too much. But *nothing* is worse than thinking you lit someone up only to find you are the one dead and they are barely hurt.

3. …Ubisoft Marketing

I was going to put this under number 2 and call it “…Ubisoft” but servers got me heated. The other thing I can’t stand about this game is that you have to unlock the Operators by buying them. I got about 10 operators in my $20 edition. But there are 40 operators! Minus the season 1 operators (I think), each operator is $5. So if I bought the rest of the operators one by one that’s $150 on top of my initial $20. Now, Ubisoft has it all wrong. It doesn’t make sense to me how you can take away gameplay altering characters and put them behind paywalls. Take a note from Overwatch and invest in cosmetic paywalls. Don’t alter gameplay.

You can buy the operators in season bundles making them much cheaper or with in-game currency. But if you were to unlock every operator with in-game currency, it would take about 30 hours of gameplay per character. Ridiculous. They’ve also got cosmetics you can buy which are just too expensive to justify… But we’ll leave it at that.

The Sunny Side

Like I said before, I love this game. Not even the negative experiences I mentioned above have deterred me from this game. The satisfaction from winning games is second to none (less than Fortnite). When your team comes together, you all perform and work together to complete this seemingly impossible task against a bunch of jerks yelling “EZ” in chat is worth the investment. I’ve even invested in a better mouse to boost my in-game skills. After every game, all you can think about is what you would have done different and how good your next round will be.

I’ll leave you with a little highlight. Please support this article if you want more like it. All proceeds go to the Rainbow Six Siege Cosmetics Fund.